ARS: Python robotics simulator

ARS is a physically-accurate robotics simulator written in Python.
Its main purpose is to help researchers to develop mobile
manipulators and, in general, any multi-body system. It
is open-source, modular, easy to learn and use,
and can be a valuable tool in the process
of robot design, in the development of control and reasoning algorithms, as
well as in teaching and educational activities.

ARS uses
Open Dynamics Engine (ODE)
as physics engine, and
Visualization Toolkit (VTK)
as graphics engine.
While both are well regarded and popular open-source software,
ARS was designed to minimize coupling with them
(through included abstraction layers)
to let developers experiment with other alternatives.

Installation

Because ARS is pip-compatible,
it's very easy to install, upgrade and uninstall it:

$ pip install ARS
$ pip install --upgrade ARS
$ pip uninstall ARS

While that's the recommended way to go, you may still follow
the old-fashion procedure: download the file, unpack and run

$ python setup.py install

Requirements

ARS needs:

Python 2.6 or 2.7

ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) 0.12 with Python bindings

VTK (Visualization Toolkit) 5.8 with Python bindings

NumPy 1.6

ODE and VTK can be somewhat complicated to install, depending on your OS.

For detailed installation instructions (ARS and requirements)
and troubleshooting, see the
online documentation.

Documentation

The documentation is hosted at
ReadTheDocs.org
and it is generated dynamically after each commit to the repository.

License

This software is licensed under the OSI-approved "BSD License". To avoid
confusion with the original BSD license from 1990, the FSF refers to it as
"Modified BSD License". Other names include "New BSD", "revised BSD", "BSD-3",
or "3-clause BSD".

See the included LICENSE.txt file.

Tests

To run the included test suite you need more packages (tox and mock):

~/ars$ pip install -r requirements_test.txt
~/ars$ tox

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